The paper is more interesting than just another VLM for OCR, they start talking about compression and stuff. E.g. there is this quote >Our work represents an initial exploration into the boundaries of vision-text compression, investigating how many vision tokens are required to decode text tokens. The preliminary results are encouraging: DeepSeek-OCR achieves near-lossless OCR compression at approximately 10× ratios,…
LLMs are compute heavy with quadratic scaling (in compute) per tokens. They are trying to compress text tokens into visual tokens with their VLM. Maybe they would render texts to an image before tokenizing to reduce the compute cost.
So I guess my question is where is the juice being squeezed from, why does the vision token representation end up being more efficient than text tokens.